Microsoft Talks About Designing Office For iPad, Offers Behind-The-Scenes Look At The Design And Creative Journey

Since its launch few months back, Office for iPad apps was downloaded over 27 million times by users. It has got great reviews from both general consumers and the tech press. Today, Microsoft published a blog post talking about the design process of Office for iPad. They have given us the behind-the-scenes look at the design and creative journey as they created the reimagined Office from the ground up for iPad. The Office for iPad has Microsoft Office Ribbon UI designed specifically for iOS7 following Microsoft’s modern language design principles.

While the mobile productivity scenarios above helped us define the “What,” we also wanted to nail the “How.” When we looked at how people were using existing productivity solutions on the iPad, we observed that many users found themselves being “perpetual beginners.” This means they found themselves spending more time learning the product than actually using it, which of course is contrary to the goal of productivity. So when it came to defining our user experience goals, it was important to us that users could just pick up our product and get started right away. With that in mind, our user experience goals were:

Familiar Office experience, with no learning curve

Unmistakably Office, optimized for iPad

Immersive and removes distractions

Document content, not UI, takes center stage

Experience is always beautiful, fast, and fluid

The purpose of a familiar Office experience is simple: a low learning curve and high user confidence. However, it’s just as important to strike a balance between “unmistakably Office” and “platform optimization,” which means optimizing for iOS platform conventions and touch-first user expectations. The most important, yet challenging, goal was finding the sweet spot between the essence of Office and iOS. Fortunately, since the Office for iPad and Mac team (formally known as the Macintosh Business Unit) is made up of Apple platform specialists, we were able to apply our deep knowledge of Apple platforms to the task.